https://www.mohaumodisakengstudio.com/work daily 0.75 2022-06-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1449076284360-CH7JEYGV8L4HGQET98Q0/image.jpeg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1473263405136-4HCN8L7VJWW6I47HQC2Z/milk1of2.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1505641142375-B9I60YNIEG5I8H73QUKD/_MG_3513.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1503393442353-5IBGUDFTU25ZJPX3STUH/Shot-03_0046-copy-072.jpg WORK P a s s a g e, 2017 Three Channel HD Video 18:49 min Edition of 10 + 2 AP Passage (2017) by Mohau Modisakeng, is a three-channel projection that meditates on slavery’s dismemberment of African identity and its enduring erasure of personal histories. In each of the artwork’s three projections, we are confronted with a character – a woman with a hawk perched on her arm, a young man in a Trilby hat and a woman wrapped in a Basotho blanket. The arched shape of the boat frames each passenger with their heads pointed towards the prow of the boat, they are each traveling with a single possession. As the passengers lie motionless on their backs looking up at the sky they begin to perform a series of actions that move between gestures of struggle and resignation. A pool of water slowly forms beneath their bodies. The rising water gradually floods the well of the boat eventually leaving the passengers submerged while the boat is slowly sinking and eventually disappearing. In Passage, the ebb and flow of water, as both life giving and deadly, symbolizes the many who have arrived or departed from South Africa in trade, as cargo or as transient bodies belonging to no particular state. In South Africa, systems of indentured labour and slavery were instituted by the Cape Colony in 1652 to meet the growing demand for labour. Dutch settlers imported people from the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Madagascar, East Africa and Angola, putting them to work on plantations and at ports. South Africa became a jostling ground between the Dutch and British, its native people rendered as mere commodities moving through the establishment of an industrialized mining economy, as labourers and as soldiers in the Anglo Boer and world wars. In Setswana the experience of life is referred to as a ‘passage’. The Setswana word for life, botshelo, means ‘to cross over’. As such, all human beings are referred to as bafeti (‘voyagers’), a word that points to the fact that the experience of life is transient; it has a beginning and an end, as with any voyage. Passage (2017) was commissioned by the South African Department of Arts and Culture on the occasion of the 57th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1472647160154-6UMSYA2XPD0TSEQ7QDDC/mohau-coal-web.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1520421787539-HHVOHKUQAGEZ2S7G7PD7/Job_2512_new.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1540819428852-DYQHNXWO5IEL9J35WNPL/MM001web.jpg WORK - Black Family Album This selection of photographs, shot on a medium format film camera depict different members of my family. These were taken in 2018 during a family gathering in the Free State to mark the unveiling of several tombstones of people belonging to the Modisakeng, Makhoba and Mckenzie family. This was an opportunity for me to practice taking black and white portraits to represent the Black Family Album. In this collection i’ve documented my mother, aunts, fiance, uncles and nephew. The textured background with a leaning fence, dried up vine and cracked wall is the house next door to my grandmother’s house in the township of Bochabela where my mother grew up. This project represents a small aspect of an extensive documentary photography projects that includes an unpublished set of photographs depicting workers in the pine mills of Limpopo Province, the coal miners of Emalahleni ( Mpumalanga), and the illegal gold miners of the West Rand in Gauteng known as the Zama Zamas. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1564827057557-BXWKBIKVNC4D287YVCJE/Mohau_ZION_1611.jpg WORK ZION deals with the relationship between body and place. The idea that all people are meant to belong somewhere, some place, yet in reality there are millions of people that are unsettled, in search of refuge, migrating across borders and landscapes for various reasons. In this work there is no obvious signifier of place except for a heap of coal being thrown on a table, onto the floor and over he body. The black rocks of fossilised material represents the abundant natural mineral wealth deposited beneath the ground. Whilst coal is a valuable source of energy across the world, sustaining modern economies and industries, the more valued minerals such as oil, gold, copper and diamonds, which are found in abundance on the African continent, often breed and fuel conflict. And whilst most people are forced to flee from their homes due to harsh climate and collapsing economies, civil war is amongst the leading causes of migration across the african continent. As such, the depiction of coal in this series not only refers to the mineral wealth attached to place, it also refers to the absence of place as people flee from their homes due to the violence that follows the exploitation of these types of mineral resources. The Zion series thus refers not only to the absence of place/home but also to the many conflicts that have caused the forced migration of millions of African people within the African context, casting them into a life of refuge. The series depicts a struggle of a woman, who in the time of conflict often assumes the role of the provider and a carer, struggles to retain some sense of home....she is seen at the diner table serving a resource for the (human) family to consume...while in a fleeting state. In this work the tensions of this relationship of exploitation is anchored by an unusual love story. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1574982281838-1XD54QNOL88TMW5MUPB1/Click+Festival+2019+-244.jpg WORK No Serenity Here (inspired by the work of ntate Keorapetse Kgositsile) //// An omelette cannot be unscrambled. Not even the one prepared in the crucible of 19th century sordid European design. When Europe cut up this continent into little pockets of its imperialist want and greed it was not for aesthetic reasons, nor was it in the service of any African interest, intent, or purpose. When, then, did the brutality of imperialist appetite and aggression evolve into something of such ominous value to us that we torture, mutilate, butcher in ways hideous beyond the imagination, rape women, men, even children and infants for having woken up on what we now claim, with perverse possessiveness and territorial chauvinism, to be our side of the boundary that until only yesterday arrogantly defined where a piece of one European property ended and another began? read more… //// This performance work is loosely based on the words of Ntate Kgosietsile Keorapetse, it reflects a conversation/exchange of struggle between two characters, one represented in the music and soundscape played by cellist and the choreography of a dancer (played by Aphiwe) who speaks with his body to communicate across space. The dialogue between the two encompasses the tensions between notions of home and exile, foreign and native, self and other within the context of the historic and often violent migration between Africa and Europe. The work represents a dichotomy of two different worlds engaged in a dialogue characterised by moments of misunderstanding, and discord, which are sometimes reconciled in moments of harmony between the sound of the cello and the actions of the dancer. Performed in Helsingor, Denmark 2019 with Mohau, Aphiwe Livi and music by Lil Lacy https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1575043162970-Z9RH3K3RZPAG6JW3O1WS/Click+Festival+2019+-251.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1580714746658-GH6AL7JS7RM9W53Q7VFX/Untitled+45.jpg WORK ZION attempts to draw parallels in the experience of displacement within the context of South Africa’s history of racial segregation and forced removals within the global climate of mass migration. The work is focused on visualizing the universal anxiety caused by the resurgence of racist and xenophobic rhetoric in parts of Europe and the United States. In a time of extreme poverty, political conflict, violence and human rights abuses, people all over the world are being forced to seek new lives elsewhere. In this atmosphere of forced migration, which has seen people uprooted from the countries of their birth and forced to move to other parts of the world by land and sea, established notions of home, nationhood, citizenship, and personal identity have become unsettled. The work deals with the consequences of political policies in South Africa such as the Group Areas Act, which was created by the apartheid government of South Africa, and assigned racial groups to different residential and business sections in urban areas. An effect of the law was to prevent nonwhites from living in the most developed areas. The law led to the forced removal of nonwhites from homes located in areas designated for whites In the American context, a similar parallel exists in the form of the dispossession and removal of a predominantly African-American settlement in New York City known as the Seneca village, which was demolished to develop Central Park in the affluent borough of Manhattan. Established in 1825 by the 1830s Seneca Village was one of the City’s bestknown African American communities. By the 1850s Seneca Village — which had three churches, a school, and its own burial grounds — was an integrated community of almost 60 households. Most of the dwellings were inhabited by free black families, more than half of whom owned their own property, though Work Irish and German immigrants moved in later to make it one of the most stable integrated communities of the early 19th century. The performance takes the form of a procession that will travel in three parts stopping at several historically significant landmarks along the route that make connections between the removal of the community at Seneca Village and the establishment of black communities in Harlem. With this in mind, the first chapter commences from Mother AME Zion Church in Harlem - the first AfricanAmerican congregation in New York City. The route will run along Adam-Clayton Powell Jr Avenue, Martin Luther King Boulevard, passing the Hotel Theresa Building and ending in front of a brownstone house on W126th Street. The second chapter commences on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum and proceeds to Summit Rock in Central Park, which is located just north of the site once occupied by the 19th century community of Seneca Village. The third and final phase of the performance will take place in Time Square, proceeding along 42nd Street to the Broadway Plaza between 42nd and 43rd Streets for a choreographed performance, before exiting along 43rd Street. The combination of the procession and site-specific performance represents a balance between journey and destination, transience and settlement, wandering and being home. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1443804862536-6MXLA1MIVIQ2C4N0UNRL/image-asset.jpeg WORK - Metamorphoris (2015) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1610456815767-E3RPO36OB68D0Q1QZ16W/000005crop.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1610456916622-J9IHSVRAC7W3ES146R8U/image-asset.jpeg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1622275401905-O4UK02JL4JIKOUS8RGMP/2_Ditaola+II.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1592137965834-9CJK7CVRXF8C563R3GIH/image009.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1633248643323-VNNEABY4TTLD06PNGVM8/image-asset.jpeg WORK - Rona Batho “Rona Batho” (2021). Nelson Mandela Monument Project commissioned by the City Of Amsterdam at the Nelson Mandelapark, The Bijlmer. Amsterdam South East. Photo by Gert-Jan van Rooij Related Article/ Scions: The Afterbirth of Mohau Modisakeng In Conversation with Mohau Modisakeng https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1449100689471-2DW6DOJ4A3GEZPYZ8Y3R/image.jpeg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1648737080984-DT5T4DRBQ0V3TVG1QEAJ/image-asset.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1444765934336-C1681P86L7BN2N88ABOG/mohausmoke2.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1444828902258-9624D1IZF4VJZI3HF6X2/inzilo_still_7.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1444849224286-Z324CHZWT1O9QYDF3XKL/Untitled+%28frame+X%29.jpg WORK https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54de3476e4b03a8b46d9555b/1444922977974-OQW1XFCTJVRWFVOBQCFK/film+still3.jpg WORK 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